I left the previous post at lunchtime of the Phoenix Bakery’s excellent Monday Baking School, with Jean and me enjoying our pizzas.
Much refreshed, we rejoined Aidan Chapman in the bakery, where our beetroot and spring onion loaves had now proved. Here Aidan is demonstrating how they should feel when they’re ready for the oven:
Posted in Cooking
Tagged Aidan Chapman, beetroot bread, focaccia, grignette, grissini, lame, Monday Baking School, Phoenix Bakery, soda bread, sourdough, Sourdough bread, Weymouth
Ever since the Cake and Bake Show, when we saw Aidan Chapman demonstrating his sourdough techniques, we’ve been looking forward to attending one of his courses.
Monday Baking School is held on the last Monday of every month. We had high hopes, but Aidan exceeded all our expectations. It was superb. Twenty four hours later, we’re still both buzzing.
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Posted in Cooking
Tagged Aidan Chapman, Breadmaking, focaccia, Monday Baking School, Phoenix Bakery, sourdough, sourdough pizza
Well, it had to be done. We went to the Caravan Show, more properly the Motorhome and Caravan Show at the NEC. I must say, I do enjoy this sort of thing. Motorbike show, boat show, poultry show, country and shooting show, and recently the baking show, we normally do two or three a year.
Posted in Caravans
Tagged Airstream, Caravan, Motorhome and Caravan Show, T@B teardrop caravan
The rain was lashing down this morning, so the chickens got to stay in their covered run until the day cheered up a bit. But we fulfilled a long-held plan, and visited St Albans Farmers Market, where we sought out Messrs Samphire, who specialise in rare breed free-range pork.
A very wet but welcoming St Albans Farmers Market
Samphire not only make delectable pork pies and sausages (which I have ambitions to emulate), but they also run a scheme called My Little Porkie whereby you adopt a piglet and commit to buy the meat once it’s fully grown.
So in around 6 months we’ll be taking delivery of forty kilos or more of rare breed pork. Meanwhile we’ll be able to follow the progress of our own pig as it grows to maturity. I’d love to rear a pig myself, but I have a suspicion that the council allotments officer would take serious exception.
Posted in Allotments, Cooking
Tagged adopt a pig, My Little Porkie, pork pies, rare breed pork, Samphire Shop, sausages
We finally got around to taking the caravan on its first modest outing. The idea was to find somewhere close by that would offer nice walks and where we could practise setting up and taking down the caravan. Well, we found it, and with only one or two misadventures, it was a great success. Seasoned caravanners would of course be amused at our amateur mistakes!
We chose Gosfield Lake, near Braintree. Essex may not be everyone’s idea of a holiday destination, but it has pretty countryside beloved of John Betjeman, plenty of pubs, and decent roads for the novice caravanner!
In high season, Gosfield Lake is a water ski centre.
Posted in Caravans
Tagged Bulldog leveller, caravan setup, Essex walks, Gosfield Hall, Gosfield Lake
We live quite close to the Franchi Seeds of Italy warehouse. They host open days from time to time, but for some reason we’ve never been. Well, we did today. We expected to stay for half an hour or so, but it was so friendly and so interesting that we lingered much longer than that.
One reason was that Paolo Arrigo, one of the owners of this family run business, also restores accordions, and when we arrived the warehouse was filled with music. He demonstrated one of his recent restorations.
On Friday, we finally decided we’d had enough. Fridays seem to be the worst, but every day we’re pestered with unwanted telephone calls. It’s a common story, I know. But now we’ve got this …
It’s a trueCall call screener, and it’s a class act. Programmable to block or accept all sorts of different calls, it’ll take messages and record calls. Best of all, it tells spammers, scammers, survey monkeys, and ambulance chasers, “We’re not interested in your call – please hang up now and don’t call us again!” That is, of course if their CRM software hasn’t already cut the call when it detected an answerphone. Deeply satisfying.
It’s end of day one at the allotment for our new flock. They had a good run this morning, and a brief outing late this afternoon. The new birds are loving their outside time. They’d really worn their little patch of garden lawn to a frazzle, and now they’ve got lovely long grass once again.
Posted in Allotments, Poultry
Tagged A&P growers pellets, Garvo breeders mash, hens and broccoli, Ixworth chickens
We’ve spent the last week or so reinforcing the second run at the allotment, which was broken into by a fox last year. Another layer of heavier duty weldmesh has been added to the bottom half.
Last night was the night that this year’s newly hatched chickens moved from the back garden, where they were getting a bit cramped, to the allotment. We moved them at dusk, putting them into the house and hoping they’d roost straight away, but they were having none of it, and came straight out into the run. I was a wee bit worried that the smell of the creosote that I’d used against red mite had put them off, but I needn’t have worried. When we checked on them after dark, they were roosting snugly.
My previous post told the story of how much we enjoyed the demonstrations at the Cake and Bake Show, to which we’d won tickets via lovefood.com.
This post is more of a miscellany of things that caught our eye as we went round. Although we’re not skilled cakemakers, the really beautiful stands displayed the high skills of the cake decorating world.
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